JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

The Earth Killer lay on her belly on the mattress, her face squashed against it in profile. She was naked, and so was the man lying across her back. Private Cortez had his pistol in his fist, and he kept its muzzle pressed against the blue woman's skull. Hearing the door open, Cortez had raised his head. "Dung," he hissed. Thi Gonh opened her eyes.

The tip of Stake's boot caught the Earth soldier under the jaw. He then descended on Cortez with his fist. When he had rolled Cortez's moaning hulk off the small woman, Stake stomped him between the legs, and then on the face. He heard his nose break. Blood sparkled on his boot.

"Stop it!" Devereux shouted, trying to grab at Stake from behind.

Stake's pistol smashed across Devereux's jaw in an arc as he tore it out of its holster. He then aimed the weapon at the stunned soldier's face. Blood started to run into the palm Devereux clamped over his mouth. Cortez's faraway moans sounded like he was having some terrible nightmare.

"Anyone touches this woman again, I will kill them. I will. absolutely. kill them."

"She's using you!" Devereux sobbed. "She doesn't give a blast about you, or me, or any of us! She'd kill us all if she could!"

"Get out of here. And take your friend to the medic, before I decide to shoot his stinking jewels off."

Devereux dragged Cortez's nude body from the room, leaving a swath of blood. And Stake turned to look down at the prisoner. She had pulled her clothing to her, but held it balled up in front of her in clenched fists. For the first time, he saw her eyes were moist with tears that she was fighting to restrain. For the first time, she revealed to Stake that she knew some words of English, after all.

"T'ank you, Ga Noh," she said in her dark voice. "T'ank you, take care, take care of me."

Ga Noh. He remembered it now. Henderson had told Stake she'd referred to him this way, after seeing his face change the first time. Ga Noh was something like a chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil.

"I'm sorry," he told her.

She held her hand out to him. He stared at it.

Using you, Devereux had said. Only using you.

Why had he found himself attracted to her, even before he'd learned that she had spared three of his men? Was it indeed just her beauty blinding him? Was the shapeshifting mutant so desperate for the attentions of a woman? Any woman? He felt a moment of contempt for her. Contempt for himself.

And then he took her hand.

Private investigator Jeremy Stake awoke to find that Buddy Balloon had been replaced by a late night talk show. A naked starlet sat giggling in the interviewee chair, luminous green tattoos twined around her overly large breasts like the vines of pumpkins. He turned his head to see that Yuki Fukuda's biology teacher, Janice Poole, had dozed off in her purple silk robe beside him. He stared at her profile for a few moments. Private Devereux had been dead for ten years now-killed the first day that Stake's unit and the cloned Rangers ventured out from the monastery togeth-er-but his words still echoed in Stake's mind. U sing you.

He stole out of bed, gathered up his clothing. He was afraid that the sound of showering would rouse Janice, but this was not so much out of consideration for her. He just slipped into his things, buckled on his gun's holster, and stepped out into the chill of Punktown's night.

"I saw an elephant, Mom!" the little Choom boy said to his mother as she pulled him along the sidewalk, away from the mouth of the alley he was pointing into. It wasn't good to linger too close to alleys in Punktown, whether above or down here in the sector called Subtown, lest one be pulled inside that alley by a mugger or rapist, drug addict or addled homeless person.

The homeless person leaned forward out of the shadows a bit, watching the child point back at him. The boy's words meant nothing to him. He did not know he was being confused with an animal that the boy had an inaccurate understanding of, but which the homeless person did resemble in the most superficial of ways. For one thing, he had grown larger. He was taller now than most of the people he saw on the streets. This made them look at him more. That was why he preferred to venture out of the maze of alleys only when the lights in the concrete sky dimmed and artificial night fell over the twinned, shadow city of Subtown.

He turned away from the mouth of the alley, which teased him with its view of the lively bustle of traffic and people. People who, unlike him, seemed to know exactly where they were going. No, he turned the other way, deeper into the network of passageways behind and between the squat buildings that rose from the cavern's floor like stalagmites.

Behind an atypically wider structure called Fallon Waste Management Systems, the homeless person ducked beneath some thick pipes that ran out of the building's flank and curved to disappear into the floor of the back lot like gigantic tree roots that had nourished the building's growth. He passed through a gust of warm air blowing out of a huge fan behind a protective grille. There was something of a grotto back here that he hadn't chanced upon before. It looked very promising as a shelter, though the fan made the climate-controlled air warmer than he liked.

There were more pipes of varying thickness; a nest of them. Red valves locked inside clear plastic security boxes. Nevertheless, steam hissed out of leaks here and there. The homeless person had to get down on hands and knees to proceed deeper, and at last he came upon a little bower made from these pipes and a projection of the building that formed a corner. He discerned two eyes, brightly reflecting the light back at him, watching him approach. At first, when he noticed these eyes, the homeless person paused. But then he understood that this was one of those metal people he saw on occasion. He did not know words like automaton or robot, but he could comprehend that it was a creature not quite alive like himself. Usually they were moving. This one didn't move at all, and looked to be missing some of its parts. Though he knew these metal people were not alive, he also suspected that this one had in its way crawled into this hidden nest to die.

As the homeless person drew nearer to the robot, it spoke to him in a wary, shaky voice. "Who is that? What do you want?" it demanded.

The homeless person froze, confused. When another being poked its head out from behind the dead robot he realized that he had been mistaken, but he still did not know whether to withdraw, or wait for the hidden person to say more. Before he could do anything else, the person spoke again. More of her came into view, also. She was a woman, with matted yellowish-white hair, a wool hat pulled down over it. In one blue-veined fist she gripped a piece of pipe. Or maybe it was a piece of the robot she hid behind.

"This is my place. Can't you see that?" she rasped at him. Then, her nervous face twisted in an exaggerated expression of befuddlement. "What the hell are you? A mutant?"

He had heard that word used about him before, when people saw him on the street. The word didn't have the excited wonderment of the word "elephant" that the little boy had uttered.

The woman took in the homeless person's frayed, dirty poncho fashioned from a blue plastic tarp. "You're like me, huh?" she grumbled. "No place else to go?"

He didn't move. He was timid, because her voice was harsh and she still held that pipe, although she probably weighed as much as one of his stout limbs.

"I used to have a place, a nice place!" she blurted, as if accusing him for changing that situation. "I was born on Earth, not here, not down in this hole! I had a husband, and a good job-can you believe that? But we never had kids. Pollution got in my system. Oh, we couldn't afford to fix that, and we couldn't afford to adopt. Things went downhill when he lost his job, and then I did, too. Can you believe the way people are forced to live in this city? While those rich scum sit in their fancy restaurants looking down on the rest of us?"